IF you want to guarantee that an idea will be rejected by teachers and education-alists just mention that parents are in favour.

At my school the cane was kept in a glass case in the headmaster’s office []

So when a survey was published yesterday showing that almost half of all parents – 49 per cent – think that the cane should be brought back to punish “very bad” behaviour that alone was enough to guarantee that it will not happen.

For the ideologues who have presided over the collapse of discipline in schools, parents are not people to be listened to and respected, they are half- wits to be ignored.

Sure enough the teaching unions lined up to denounce the idea.

The National union of Teachers – the largest and the organisation that has done more to ruin education than any other single body in the country – said that the way to discipline pupils was to reward good behaviour.

The Department for Education announced grandly: “There is no intention of ever reintroducing corporal punishment.”

Corporal punishment ended in state schools in 1987 and in private schools in 1998

Michael Gove may be an admirable Secretary of State but his department – the civil servants who remain in post as ministers come and go – is still dominated by the same ideology which has failed pupils for so many decades.

Read the poll and it’s clear that parents take a common sense attitude.

Because the 49 per cent who want to see greater punishment for the worst behaviour by pupils did not just demand the return of the cane, which is clearly the most severe form of corporal punishment.

They want to have corporal punishment more generally – a smack, for instance – available.

Notably it’s not just parents who say this.

Nearly one in five pupils themselves wants to see it available again.

For pupils who are well behaved there are few things more demotivating than seeing their thuggish peers effectively let off scot free.

Corporal punishment ended in state schools in 1987 and in private schools in 1998.

But when parents and children talk about the need for its return there is a misconception about the role of corporal punishment.

Having it available does not mean, as opponents try to make out, that children should receive regular beatings.

That is exactly what it prevents. It is the threat of corporal punishment – some- thing more than detention or a telling off – that is its power and its point.

Indeed any school which had to use corporal punishment more than very occasionally would be a school incapable of keeping discipline and so failing at the most basic level.

at my school the cane was kept in a glass case in the head- master’s office. Every boy in the school knew it was there. and the headmaster – a stern man whose look was alone enough to keep order – would, we knew, use it if he had to. and that was why he didn’t have to.

It was the ultimate deterrent.

In fact in my entire time at the school I can’t recall a single instance of him using it on anyone.

The threat that he might was enough to do the job of keeping hundreds of boys in check.

So when I write that his look was enough to keep order I am wrong.

From the perspective of a boy it wasn’t the look alone that instilled order.

It was the knowledge that if we didn’t do what he said we could be punished. and not just with words.

Today everything has shifted.

It’s not pupils who fear teachers but the other way round.

Only this week William Stuart, a teacher with an impeccable record, was acquitted of assaulting a pupil who had quite clearly been out of control.

The power now lies with pupils who, in a parody of the way things should work, talk defiantly to teachers about knowing their rights and make threats of legal action.

But what if a teacher does actually strike a pupil?

What if a young thug has been causing mayhem in school and a teacher smacks him or her?

The teacher’s world would fall apart, suspended before being sacked, prosecuted and dragged through the courts, as happened to Mr Stuart.

And yet not only might the child have deserved it, it could be just what is needed to instil a sense of discipline in a wayward child who could go on to be a wayward adult.

As last month’s riots showed too many children and young adults today have no sense of discipline and no respect for authority.

They treat authority with contempt.

It is all very well saying that teachers do not need the threat of violence to be able to instil discipline.

For many pupils that is surely true but for many others there is no ultimate sanction, the threat of which leads to good behaviour.

There are just empty threats, which are not backed up by anything that has an impact on the child.

a smack rather than the kid gloves which are the limit of punishment today might be just what is needed.

Certainly parents appear to believe this.

Eighty five per cent think that teachers are given less respect by pupils now than when they were at school.

And 91 per cent say teachers have indeed become more fearful of their pupils.

This is crazy.

If we lived in a country in which discipline was good and it was clear that the abolition of corporal punishment had made no difference then there would be no arguments in its favour.

But none of that is the case. We only need to look at schools and at how much worse discipline now is and it is starkly clear that something is missing: the sanction, the threat and the fear of corporal punishment.

Comments Unavailable

Sorry, we are unable to accept comments about this article
at the moment. However, you will find some great articles
which you can comment on right now in our
Comment section.